French 3295: Partnering with Native Speakers to Document Louisiana French

During the course of the semester students will study the particularities of the French spoken by Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana and apply this knowledge to an authentic language documentation project. The project will allow students to apply and enhance their linguistic skills as you interview fluent senior citizen Cajun French speakers, then preserve representative samples of their French speech in their oral histories and other narratives. You will transcribe, edit and translate these samples, and incorporate them with visual support into a multimedia presentation that will be presented to the Cajun speakers as a family heirloom and to the T. Harry Williams Oral History Collection as a linguistic and historic artifact.